Copyright ©Tatar 2006
In our handheld math and science projects, we built our own connectivity or piggy-backed on the work of others. Now, we are working on a general purpose architecture to support complex classroom connectivity.
From a psychological/pedagogical point of view, we are looking at a multiplicity of systems of coordination involving people and machines. Because we start with a general purpose coordination language, we can quickly prototype novel kinds of connectivity. Undergraduates at Virginia Tech have to date built ten working prototypes of coordination activities, primarily games. You can find out more about these prototypes. We are currently analyzing their cognition as programmers over the first semester of exposure to this radical new technique.
From a technical perspective, our architecture is based on an underlying machine coordination language called Tuple Spaces. Tuple spaces provide a flexible way of coordinating resources using what is most easily understood as a publish/subscribe pardigm. That is, users write and take resources to and from a shared space.
Three papers report so far begin to report on this work:
Lin, Sirong, Tatar, D. , Harrison, S., Roschelle, J. & Patton, C. (2006) Learning When Less is More: "Bootstrapping" Undergraduate Programmers as Coordination Designers. Participatory Design Conference , Trento Italy, August 1-5, 2006.
Roschelle, J., Schank, P., Brecht, J., Tatar, D., Chaudhury, S.R. (November, 2005) From Response Systems to Distributed Systems for Enhanced Collaborative Learning, International Conference on Computers and Education 2005 (ICCE 2005). November 28-Dec. 2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Acceptance rate: 75/271 (28%)
DiGiano, C., Patton, C., Roschelle, J., Tatar, D., Yarnall, L., Manley, M. (2003) Collaboration Design Patterns: Conceptual Tools for Planning for The Wireless Classroom. Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning , 19(3), 284-297.
See my publications page for downloads.